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How Britain brought waterboarding to Palestine

British forces who served in Ireland during its war of independence were later sent to Palestine. (National Library of Ireland/Flickr)

Were the Palestinians dispossessed by a sadistic lawyer?

Norman Bentwich was the chief legal officer with the British administration in Jerusalem between the two world wars. A committed Zionist, he drafted many of the ordinances that enabled Jewish settlers to seize land which indigenous Palestinians had farmed for generations.

Arguably, then, he was more responsible for uprooting Palestinians than anyone else in that period, except perhaps for his political overlords. There are strong reasons to suspect that Bentwich took pleasure in the pain that he caused.

In his book Mandate Memories, Bentwich admitted that a system of apartheid was introduced during that period, even using the term apartheid. The admission was not, it would appear, made through any sense of remorse. Rather, he applauded the violence by which the system was entrenched.

Orde Wingate, a British military commander who insisted that Palestinians be tortured and killed, imposed the “strictest discipline” and inspired “daring and devotion” among the Jewish troops that he mentored, according to Bentwich.

Over the past few years, I have plowed through the records left by many Britons who ruled Palestine from the 1920s to the 1940s. I was disgusted, if not surprised, by the sense of imperial hubris captured by these documents.

Yet it was a single line in Bentwich’s memoirs that unnerved me most. He noted casually that most members of a gendarmerie which the British dispatched to Palestine in the early 1920s “had been in the celebrated Black and Tan Brigade in Ireland, formed to crush the Irish rebels” during that period.

No excuse

My great granduncle, Patrick Hartnett, was shot dead by the Black and Tans – British forces stationed in Ireland during its war of independence. If a “rebel” meant somebody who was involved in an armed revolt – as Bentwich implied – then Patrick Hartnett was not a rebel.

Hartnett was a postman from Abbeyfeale, County Limerick. On 20 September 1920, he was chatting with Jeremiah Healy, a blacksmith, as they walked along a country road. The men were caught unawares by Thomas Huckerby, a member of the Black and Tans.

Huckerby shot the two men at close range, killing both of them.

A military court of inquiry accepted, in effect, that Huckerby had no excuse for his actions.

Such courts routinely handed down verdicts of “justifiable homicide” when examining killings by British forces. In Huckerby’s case, the court of inquiry merely recorded that Hartnett and Healy died because of “revolver shots fired by T.D. Huckerby.” Neither of the victims had been involved in the Irish Republican Army.

According to a local historian, Tom Toomey, Huckerby was “by far the most notorious of all the Black and Tans in County Limerick.” His other victims included John Hynes, a 60-year-old man shot dead on the way home from a pub.

Huckerby resigned from the Black and Tans towards the end of 1920. Although he had not been punished for his misdeeds, disciplinary charges were pending at the time he left the force.

Celebrated?

His barbarity was by no means atypical. The Black and Tans may have been “celebrated” in the mind of Norman Bentwich. To the Irish, they were feared and despised.

Patrick Hartnett and Jeremiah Healy were not the only ones killed by the British forces on 20 September 1920. Two men were also “done to death” – the words engraved on a commemorative stone – that day in Balbriggan, County Dublin, the town where I grew up.

The killings left a lasting bitterness. I can still recall one of the town’s residents ranting in the early 1980s against the “bastards” who killed those two men – Seamus Lawless and Sean Gibbons – more than six decades earlier. The killings took place during the “sack” of Balbriggan, when British forces burned down numerous houses and pubs and a factory on which hundreds relied for employment.

I was fascinated to learn that the gendarmerie sent to Palestine in the early 1920s was comprised largely of men who had served with the Black and Tans and a similar division called the Auxiliaries. It was that fact which prompted me to write my latest book Balfour’s Shadow.

British forces perceived their role in Palestine as similar to that which they had performed in Ireland. As Geoffrey Morton, one British officer, observed, they were “intended to be used not as real policemen but as shock troops.”

The gendarmerie to which Norman Bentwich referred was assembled in response to Palestinian anger at Britain and its sponsorship of the Zionist colonization project. The British authorities had declared a state of emergency in Palestine during the early 1920s. As a result, there were few bounds on what the British police could do.

Douglas Duff had worked with the Black and Tans in Galway. He confessed to “going berserk” after being dispatched to Palestine.

Duff, who became a police chief in Jerusalem, may have been a pioneer of waterboarding. In his memoirs, he wrote about how a torture victim would be “held down, flat on his back, while a thin-spouted coffee pot poured a trickle of water up his nose.”

Malcolm MacDonald, then Britain’s colonial secretary, stated during 1938 “that we must set our faces absolutely against the development of ‘Black and Tan’ methods in Palestine.” His plea came too late. Black and Tan methods had been used for almost two decades at that point.

Every so often, someone asks me why Irish people empathize with the Palestinians.

In the past, I have struggled to give a succinct reply. Now I am convinced that the question can be answered in four words: the Black and Tans.

Comments

A very well written article, David, with sensitivity & emotion that are palpable in your sentences. It is an irrefutable fact that Britain is responsible, in some cases directly, in some cases indirectly, for a lot of the misery, dictatorships, war fare, deaths, refugees & destruction in the world. And Britain has managed, in its usual surreptitious ways, to wash its hands of the affairs & to come out looking unblemished to the rest of the world, except of course to those who suffered at its hands, such as the Irish. How ironic that PM May has "done a deal" with the DUP, a party one could describe, without too much of a stretch of the imagination, as fascist.

The book has yet to be written, but must be written, which describes the arrogance and self-righteousness with which Britons view their conduct and behaviour during the imperial years. In archives all over the world lie contemporary accounts of the brutality shown by the British towards it's subjects. Most Zionists do not know that the British effectively destroyed all opposition to Zionism during the mandate of the Biritish Palestinian Police Force, and that Palestinian resistance to Zionism was slight.

I suspect that Irish Palestinian solidarity activists understand the nature of zionism as a colonial-settler movement and that is more likely the source of their activism not the hatred of the Black and Tans. Ireland was England's first overseas colony i.e. Ireland was a colonial-settler state like Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was included in the British Mandate documents for Palestine.

Thanks for this outstanding report. Too often, historical accounts are bereft of the personal and emotional context that lend them an enduring resonance. And it comes as no surprise at all that Palestinians were forced to live under the violent tyranny of Black and Tan thugs. Irish people have long expressed an affinity for Palestinians. As we see, there are numerous parallels and even intersections in our two histories.

Apart from their invention of water boarding, the Brits were also the 1st to use concentration camps on a nation-wide scale; this was during the Boer War in South Africa. To quote Wikipedia:

"As Boer farms were destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy—including the systematic destruction of crops and slaughtering of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms, and the poisoning of wells and salting of fields—to prevent the Boers from resupplying from a home base many tens of thousands of women and children were forcibly moved into the concentration camps. This was not the first appearance of internment camps, as the Spanish had used internment in Cuba in the Ten Years' War, but the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated."